For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.
We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender.
After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.
The Berlin Wall fell because the East Germans saw the West had more. The Koreans don't like the Japanese and try to prove to them that they are worth more in the industrial arena.
The Russians as a people had no point of conflict with the Germans; the conflict came from their respective imperialistic policies. When the Russian people learned that imperialism was historically wrong, they set up a revolution in 1917 and overthrew imperialism at home. They then negotiated for peace separately with Germany.
After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.
In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
Thus we have at least a national song that unites all Germans, and is the symbol of our sixty-million nation.
I remember taking photographs as the local Gauleiter, Albert Forster, harangued huge crowds of Germans in the evenings with a big swastika flag in the background.
In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.
The East Germans first used biomechanics. This meant that rather than guessing about technique and form, they could apply changes to athletic performance based on science.
We all need Europe, not just those of us in Europe. And we Germans need Europe more than the others. Germany is the country with the longest border, the most neighbours, and is, by population and economic strength, the number one in Europe.
The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest.
I should be very sorry if the Germans disapproved of me.
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
The defeat of the Augustan policy, as the peace with Maroboduus and the sufferance of the Teutoburg disaster may well be termed, was hardly a victory of the Germans.
One has to explain to people that the EU in this form is the answer both to 1945 and to the 21st century, in a dramatically altered world with new heavyweights, and that Germany benefits from the continued integration of Europe in political, economic and societal ways. And, of course, that means the Germans will have to pay.
I get 100 e-mails a day from Americans who say, 'What you're doing is cool - can we work for you?' From Germans, I also get 100 e-mails a day, saying, 'You fat pig!' or 'You're a liar and a criminal!' I'm trying to change this.
Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
A people that has experienced all that the Germans have been through, naturally offers fertile soil for the extremists.
We Germans have a special responsibility to be alert, sensitive, and aware of what we did during the Nazi era and about lasting damage caused in other countries. I've got tremendous sympathy for that.
I would do a 'Pitch Perfect 29', where the Bellas take on the Spaniards instead of the Germans. All the girls would have to learn Spanish. I'll teach them!
At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all.
At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.
People in Tel Aviv can not imagine, but in 1990, here in Leipzig or Dresden, whoever wanted to buy a car had to wait 14 years. The East Germans worked like people in the West, but the fruits of their labor were harvested by a criminal regime.
